With the West Indies Championship set to resume in February next year, Guyana Jaguars will play the first three rounds away from home.
This was revealed by Cricket West Indies’ Chief Executive Officer, Johnny Grave on Tuesday during an appearance on the Mason and Guest radio programme.
According to Grave, “The plan is for the West Indies Championship four-day competition to restart in February with teams hopefully travelling and playing…we are going to anchor we think three teams at home and three teams will travel and reverse that for the second round.”
The CEO explained, “The current plan is for Windward Islands, Barbados and Jamaica playing at home with Guyana, Trinidad and Leeward Islands travelling across those three home countries for the first three rounds and then we would split it with Guyana, Trinidad and either St. Kitts or Antigua playing at home.”
Grave said that it was a great magnitude of cricket that will be played in Guyana, St. Kitts, Antigua and Trinidad and Tobago due to the under-19 World Cup which will run from January to the second week in February.
“I would say we have to be very flexible in our approach operationally so you remember back in 2020 we were looking at hosting all six teams in one country with three venues, I wouldn’t rule that out…,” Grave explained.
The Englishman was cognizant that COVID-19, which curtailed the last four-day season back in March in 2020, is still prevalent throughout the Caribbean but was hopeful that there wouldn’t be a spike after the Christmas season.
At the start of the year, Grave appeared on the same programme and touted the possibility of a restart in April, however spikes in cases across the region made it impractical. Since the transition over to the franchise-based format, Guyana has won five years consecutively before Barbados broke the streak to be the reigning champions.
